handling, brass-colored halos worn down to the grain. More recent suffering-chips and pockmarks-was also evident.
Khristo hung his clothing on a peg. When all were undressed, Yagoda proposed a blasphemous toast. Raised his glass and called the saints faggots and whores, proposed a list of sexual indecencies and drank to each. Then, inspired, he ran to the wall where his clothing hung and returned with a pair of revolvers. The group shouted and clapped, howled with laughter and urged him on. Yagoda the Chemist, his glasses fogged, thick gray hair curling along the tops of his shoulders, began firing into the icons. The shots were painfully loud in the small room and it was all Khristo could do to keep his hands from covering his ears. Other revolvers were produced. Khristo was offered one and blew a hole in a triptych of the martyrdom of Saint Ephraem. His marksmanship produced a roar of approval.
In the sauna, they sat on cedar benches and Mitya poured a pail of water on the coals, filling the tiny room with white steam. Yagoda peered at Khristo on the bench opposite him.
“This one belongs to you, Sascha, am I right?”
A voice from the steam: “My very own.”
“And will he do the work?”
“Yes. Quietly too. The mice will never know he’s around until it’s too late.”
“You think he’s a mouser?”
“A good one, if he works at it.”
“Yes, I agree with you. He has the look. Does he have the heart for it, though? That’s what I worry about with a good mouser.”
From the steam, a different voice: “He’s the one that blew up Petenko, at Belov.”
“Oh? This is him? The Bulgarian?”
“The very one, Stoianev.”
“Stoianev. Well, I like Bulgaria. A refreshing place, I think, where, it is said, the women do it while hanging from trees. Tell me, Stoianev, is it so?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “and while they do it, they bay at the moon.”
This produced a gale of laughter and wolf howls.
Yagoda nodded with satisfaction. “Sascha is a nimble lad,” he said. “He always finds the clever ones.” He leaned a little closer. He had the elongated face and small mustache of the intellectual, gray, speculative eyes and delicate features. “Not too clever, of course. That makes people edgy. Now tell me this, and we’ll see how clever you really are. Who is it that has eyes like binoculars, ears like telephones, fingers like glue, and a mouth that whispers?”
Khristo shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Yagoda threw his slim hands into the air and his eyes sparkled with mischief. “I don’t know either,” he cried. “Let’s dig him up and find out!”
That he remembered perfectly.
Otherwise, but for two moments that would live with him for a long time, it was all darkness. Drunken shouts, breaking glass, spilled food, rain blowing against the windows.
In the first moment, there was a thickset man in the uniform of a general, who sat against a wall with his legs stretched out before him. He held his right hand tightly over his right eye while blood welled from beneath and trickled down his cheek. All the while he was singing, in a false baritone, an old Russian love song.
In the second moment, the car pulled up in Arbat Street and Mitya let Khristo out. It was a cold, drizzling dawn. Sascha had passed out in the back seat, Khristo looked back at him through the fogged window. In sleep, he had the face of an old youth, fine features blurred, morning beard a blue shadow. Khristo stood unsteadily on the sidewalk. He had been drunk, then sober, then drunk again, and now his head had a spike through the temples.
“You can get in all right?” Mitya asked from the driver’s seat.
He nodded that he could. The car pulled slowly away from the curb.
There was a woman, probably going to work, coming toward him down the street. At first he thought she was an old woman because she was stooped and walked with difficulty, but when he peered through the darkness he could see that she was not old at all, perhaps in her thirties, and rather pretty in a fragile sort of way. Perhaps, he thought, she worked at Food Store 6, which was just around the corner. Perhaps she was a clerk, coming on duty at dawn to check the produce in as it came off the wagons and trucks from the countryside. She had seen the black Pobieda, Mitya at the wheel, Sascha in his leather coat sprawled in the back seat, and Khristo, swaying for a moment on the sidewalk. She stopped, then moved around him in a wide circle, walking close to the wall of the building. She kept her eyes on the pavement in front of her, but then, just for a bare instant, she glanced at him, then looked down again, and he realized that she knew who they were. She knew
From the
Blue lantern
In Catalonia, some way inland from the ancient spice city of Tarragona, in the valley of the Rio Ebro, lay the village of San Ximene. It was any and all of the villages of Spain, a series of white cubes stacked against the side of a brown hill, outlined sharply by a hot blue sky. To the eye of the traveler, it stood high above the road, somehow remote, and very silent and still.
San Ximene, and all the countryside thereabout-the olive and lemon groves, the vineyards, the fields where sheep grazed on stubble after the cutting of the wheat-these belonged to Don Teodosio, of the noble family Aguilar.
It had always been so. Like the blistering sun that dried the soil to dust and the cold wind that blew it away, it was a law of nature, a commonplace of existence. A local maxim had it that on the third day of creation, when God divided the waters and revealed the land, the first Aguilar was discovered there, dripping, awaiting his maker with a basket of figs.
Whatever else might be said of Don Teodosio, or Dona Flora, they were, like their distant ancestor, provident with the Aguilar figs. In rush baskets woven by the maids and seamstresses of the household, the figs arrived punctually every Christmas and Easter. If you were a peasant of the San Ximene region, sometime before the coming of the great holidays you would behold the cream-colored De Bouton automobile, its body fashioned of tulipwood, rolling to a ceremonious stop in front of your mud-brick house. Miguelito, the chauffeur, would tap twice on the horn-a sound as pure as a heavenly trumpet-and you, your good wife, your shy children, and your esteemed parents would gather, bareheaded, before the whitewashed doorway to receive the gift. Dona Flora-Don Teodosio was too much occupied with grave affairs to have time for such business-would descend from the elegant car, wearing a dove-colored woolen suit with a foxtail stole, and approach the family, seconded by the chauffeur carrying the basket. She would greet you by name, inquire after the health of all, remark briefly on the piety of the season, and offer blessings all round. Miguelito would hand the basket to Dona Flora, she would in turn hand it on to the head of the household, who would thank her for the gift. Good wife, shy daughters, and esteemed mother would curtsy.
It was deemed, in general, a wise disposition of the Aguilar figs. If, somehow, you had miraculously contrived to dine as richly and voluminously as they did at the great house, the figs would have been just the thing to assure felicity of digestion, for they were infamously purgative. Perhaps they believed up there that all the world fed
